This course developed from informal cross departmental projects by Zoe Alambicum at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

Zoe Alambicum was co-founded by multimedia practitioners Cluny Strachan composer and artist, film maker and designer Tim Copsey in 1989.

• The Zoe Alambicum Ensemble’s arts remit, based at the RSAMD, was to promote, and give undergraduate students an experience in contemporary multimedia practice, (using avant grade/ contemporary composition in multimedia techniques, unusual instrumentation combinations), electro-acoustic production, and film music. The Zoe Alambicum Ensemble worked across the arts arena. It produced opera based multimedia works (RSAMD, TRAMWAY, Glasgow), other smaller multimedia performance works, music with film for broadcast, and re-contemporarised live music with large film projection performance in concert halls. At same the time it took contemporary classical based music and ideas out of the concert hall, and into different areas of arts exhibition and presentation: such as museums, cinemas, art galleries arts centres, community centres, environmental and sight specific venues such as old buildings with redevelopment potential.

• With the active support of the RSAMD, Glasgow School of Art, BBC Scotland, and other established arts organisations such as the Scottish Sculpture Trust, this hands on professional production vehicle was a way to consolidate and develop the interests of many student musicians, opera singers, performers and theatre practitioners, who wanted to explore 21st century performance techniques and production methods.

• The Zoe Alambicum Ensemble was an invaluable experience for students preparing for the road ahead as professionals. It gave them the opportunity to work in cross-platform environments and in film music. The educational objectives behind production was to broaden the application of their performance and instrumental skills through productions with unusual relationships between media. It gave them a hands experience of having to reference their skills to a wider arts and social context. Production processes developed the students as thinking artists, encouraging their versatility in responding to technical problems and difficult concepts stemming from the work at hand.

• Zoe Alambicum encouraged the participating student production collaborators (instrumental soloists, opera singers, directors, artists, sculptors, dancers, actors performance artists,) to discover these new opportunities that they might not otherwise have considered before through their individual core studies. Students were guided towards discovering new relevance, and new perspectives in applying their skills in wider context of contemporary performance practice. Zoe Alambicum aims were to help students develop a wider context in which to reference their skills outside of an established or conservative understanding of repertoire.

• Zoe Alambicum collaborations established links between new associate producers 21st century musicians, composers, filmmakers, theatre practitioners, and performers in Brussels (the Kaai Theatre, Ictus Ensemble), London (South Bank), Glasgow (TRAMWAY), and further a field. This network continues today supporting and developing professional educational resources across Europe.

Cluny's work deals with the nature of form, spatial relationships within form, scored live and prerecorded sound/ instrumentation, opera, architecture, film, time based art, sight specific art/ performance and sculpture.

In 1994 Zoe Alambicum was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Bursary to develop performance practice through a network ensemble concept and strategy called the Zoe Alambicum Ensemble now part of AMGLASBRU, a network resource production agency. The Zoe Alambicum Ensemble started primarily as a core group of musicians from the RSAMD who Cluny met during his postgraduate year in compositional studies with James Macmillan. The idea behind this ensemble was to promote contemporary classical music practice with a strong Electro-Acoustic remit, techniques, and unusual instrumentation combinations, by taking it out of the concert hall, and into different areas of arts exhibition and presentation such as museums, art galleries arts centers, community centres, environmental and sight specific venues such as old buildings with redevelopment potential.

Performances and projects with the Zoe Alambicum Ensemble in collaboration with Tim Copsey (original concept and libretto) included an original full scale Opera called the “The Five Planes Of Existence”, where a large Electro- Acoustical component worked in counterpoint with a chamber group. This Electro-Acoustical element developed both the text and narrative and non-narrative structural environment, while at the same time playing an intrinsic part of the way that the characters developed through film as set design. One element of Cluny's use of electro-acoustic techniques in this work where to extend the vocal parameters of the characters out into a surround sound type environment. Cluny digitally manipulated pre-recorded text and developed decontextualising sound worlds: morphing sounds like horses into trains. This production was financially assisted by the RSAMD with technical support from BBC Scotland.

Other events included a six week performance series at the New Arts Series Exhibition (Derek Jarman had been the last artist to exhibit as part of this series), at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, in collaboration with sculptor Stephen Skrinka, a 3 week residency at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, performances at Sound City Festival, Glasgow, Edinburgh City Arts Centre, Glasgow School of Art sponsored by STV, and a Scottish Arts Council and Michael Bonaventure commissioned contemporary organ work and electric guitar and film projection work (Tim Copsey) performance, in association with Photo Feis, a nation wide photographic festival.

These concerts brought together a wide range of people interested in one or more aspects of different creative mediums being utilised, such as film, stage production, visual art, graphic design, performance art, theatre dance or architecture. This work proved effective at vitalising and contemporarising interest in classical music practice amongst Cluny's generation, while playing a role, all be it on a small budget, in the cultural activities and development, of not just cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, but further a field. All this work was beautifully played and dedicatedly rehearsed by professionals, recent students and students alike who have now all gone on to successful careers with world class orchestras, and in the music industry at large. Cluny has ability to bring people together and thrives on understanding their needs and helping them to develop as arts and music practitioners.

Zoe Alambicum's objectives in creating new avenues for contemporary live, pre-recorded and electronic music into the multimedia arena also generated other outside RSAMD funded concerts at the Stevenson Hall. An example of these concerts include a performance of Gaspard De La Nuit by Ravel and Fratres by Avo Part with a huge projection of a specially made film. This led to a short digital film commission from Liverpool City Council called “Absent Lip- Sync”, scored for pre -recorded sound landscape and live amplified Tuba and Harp. Cluny also became actively involved with the Scottish Sculpture Trust performing as a violinist and electro-acoustics composer promoting Glasgow’s successful bid to be European City of Architecture.

Zoe Alambicum's dedication to promoting and organising contemporary music and multimedia performance events led to being awarded an EC Music Development grant from Glasgow City Council in 1996, to develop an infrastructure capable of supporting an International Electro-Acoustic Networking Company. One of the incentives behind this network production resource is the development and creative integration of audio/ visual technology in 21st century culture, arts and performance practice. The fruits of this manifested itself in the writing and production of a Tramway/ Scottish Arts Council Performing Arts Department commissioned opera for TRAMWAY 1, Glasgow. This multimedia work is a contemporary classical based opera working with the technological, structural and cultural influences of techno and jungle music called “The Aretology of Kyme” for mezzo soprano and digitally recorded and manipulated ensemble. The central character of Isis in this monodrama about the death and rebirth of Egyptian god/ king Osiris, and reminiscent of Ewartung by Schoenberg in theatrical nature, was performed by Emily Strode, a protégé of one the world’s leading contemporary music exponent mezzo soprano singers, Linda Hirst.

The aims behind Cluny's interests in music and multimedia are about liberating the multi-leveled relationships between the visual image, drama and music. He is especially interested in the ways in which multi media and performance can generate new path ways into the imagination, and cross the boundaries between perception, the human condition, and awareness of ourselves and society in general. Cluny's intension behind this opera was to expose the nature of language, to extend it, and sculpt it in a way that accentuated its sources, rhythms and meta-physicality. Cluny wanted to find some kind origin of meaning and communication, and to push language beyond the literal, into a new territory where meaning and instinct become intertwined in a continuously moving psychological landscape where situation, and context were deliberately shifted.

"In 'The Aretology of Kyme', I wanted to discover the intrinsic elements of language by phonetically communicating in Egyptian, Greek and English. The structural inter-relationship between language, sound and music broke down into this abstract world of phonetic ritual asymmetric quasi repetition; juxtaposition working in counterpoint with a computer controlled, generated, and manipulated instrumentation."

Though this work is non-representational, the different dimensional aspects of Isis, the deconstruction and reconstruction of Osiris, and of RA, and the different aspects of their planes of existence, is a direct cultural and anthropological structure upon which this multi-dimensional counterpoint could is hung and interwoven.